The History & Philosophy Of Science: More Important Than Ever

If you believe the doomsayers, society is falling apart. We’re living in an age of tension between maskers and anti-maskers; climate activists and climate deniers; flat-Earthers (a minority, to be sure, but a vocal one) and round-Earthers. Nuclear weapons exist, and they’re widespread; we might be teetering on the brink of the most technologically advanced (read: “destructive”) warfare in history.

All of these issues — every single one of them — is fundamentally scientific in nature. Every piece of data, every invention, every step forwards or backwards, was ultimately made by some (often nameless) scientist.

The public’s relationship with science has been fraught since Galileo tried to convince everyone that the Sun was in the centre of the Solar System in the early 17th century. Before that, even: Socrates (a philosopher rather than a scientist, but was not an old name for science ‘Natural Philosophy’?) made such a name for himself by pulling the philosophical and religious rug from beneath the lay-person’s feet, that he was finally condemned to death.

Over 2000 years later, and little has changed but extent. We still don’t like being told what to do by ‘shrinks’ in lab-coats. Adverse reactions to masks, social distancing, and self-isolation are nothing new. The public wants to know: What is science, and how does it come to its conclusions? Why should we trust scientists?

What Is Science?

The short answer: Nobody has really decided yet.

The long answer: Science (as in ‘doing science’) is meant to be a set of systematic procedures by which knowledge might be attained. Going back to the short answer I gave above, nobody has exactly decided on either what those procedures are, or, more properly, whether it is actually knowledge, in the deepest sense of the term, that is attained. After all, science can be wrong, right?

Though you could write volume after volume of books on the single question ‘What Is Science?’, I will here merely whet your appetite for the subject by dismantling the most common way people think that science is ‘done’: inductivism.

Inductive reasoning a system in which theories are derived from facts. A hypothetical scientist would collate data, and from that data produce some theory about the underlying mechanisms of or truths behind a certain phenomenon. This seems, to be sure, an entirely obvious and clear way in which scientific knowledge might progress.

However, holes started being poked in inductivism soon after its publication in 1620 by Francis Bacon. Most notably, there is David Hume’s ‘Problem of Induction’, which says in essence that induction does not lead to infallible knowledge (and therefore, depending on the definition of knowledge, does not lead to knowledge at all) because you would need an infinite number of observations of a phenomenon to make a totally infallible statement about the phenomenon.

This is most clearly put in Bertrand Russell’s somewhat comedic parable of the ‘Inductivist Turkey’. Every morning at 9am (so the story goes), the turkey is fed its breakfast. This happened the first morning, and the second morning, and the third morning, and so on. The turkey, being an intelligent and inductivist turkey, waited until he was satisfied with the quantity of observations made, and only then inductively reasoned that “Every morning at 9am, I am fed”. Thus, the turkey would wake up happy and ready for its 9am breakfast. Of course, come the morning of Christmas Eve, the Inductivist Turkey’s throat was cut.

While many philosophers of science still stick to more advanced and nuanced forms of inductivism, many made the move to the falsificationism of Karl Popper in the mid-20th century. This posits that science cannot prove the truth of a statement, but only its falsehood. If I had a hypothesis that “All swans are white”, and subsequently saw a black swan, I would have made scientific progress: I have ruled out, falsified, my earlier hypothesis, which I can now adapt. Falsificationism also provides a metric for ‘pseudo-sciences’: that is, areas of study which produce claims so broad and non-specific that can never be falsified.

However, there are a plethora of issues with any philosophy yet advanced, and the main takeaway I want you to have is summed up in my ‘short answer’ above: We haven’t decided what science is, what it’s trying to do, how it works, or how it should work — for these are eminently different things. This brings me suitably well onto my next question…

Why Should We Trust Scientists?

Well, we shouldn’t, but we should.

History shows us that scientists are certainly liable to fault, and it’s unlikely that this propensity to just get things really wrong has left us nowadays, despite the safeguards like peer review we put in place.

It was not just the average and little-educated, but also the brightest minds of uncountably many generations, that believed that the Earth was flat; that the heart was the centre of thought and ‘being’; that the blood was static inside the body and didn’t circulate; that the sky was blue because it held water above it; that stars were simply points of light in a dome above the Earth; and that abiogenesis and evolution is a myth obscuring the reality of independent acts of creation (a position still widely held, though rarely by scientists).

All of these beliefs are perfectly reasonable, rational beliefs because they, at the time, fit to available evidence. But, as is often asked: how are we to know which aspects of current knowledge have the same pitfalls? How are we to know when we simply haven’t collected enough data, or the right kind of data, or haven’t even developed the right techniques yet? Plenty of our science must, by historical rights, be wrong.

As a somewhat unfortunate result of this, we might reasonably ask the question posed above: Why should we trust scientists?

The simplest and most empirical of answers is that, as a general rule of thumb, we benefit for doing so. Not only does scientific productivity in the fields of physics and chemistry correlates better with Human Development and economic success of a nation than do any other often-proposed metrics.

When it comes to trusting the science, though, outside of the strong statistical correlation between thriving scientific research environments and economic prosperity, there are many factors that actually influence whether a given individual trusts scientists.

These are detailed in this excellent article. Among them are: gender (men being considerably more likely to say they know ‘a lot’ about science, despite this not matching education statistics); political party (Republicans are far less likely than Democrats to believe that science is objective and accurate, even sorted by groups who self-report to know ‘a lot’ about science); and the source of scientific information (with doctors or nurses being far more likely to impart accurate advice than the government, according to public perception).

Depending on your particular philosophy of science, there are many reasons we may (or may not) trust certain scientific results from certain sources over others. The extent to which science may be malleable and fit to an experimenter’s or a government’s expectations is widely variable and open to question. If even the unspoken theories that underlie observations are to some extent incorrect, then the entire house of cards built upon those axiomatic theories comes tumbling down.

I personally subscribe, as far as I yet know, to a ‘natural selection’ type approach to science. While not mutually exclusive with other philosophies of science, I believe that science is a not-infallible enterprise that reproduces and builds upon itself until certain limits are reached or until it becomes untenable, in which case it changes direction. There is no practical and universal theory of science ascribed to by all scientists, but that is not an issue, as long as science remains useful and beneficial to society at large. As long as this is true, science will continue to happen.

Summary

Science may be something of a philosophical unknown (for the time being) when it comes to putting our finger on exactly what it is — though there are plenty — far more knowledgeable than I — with their own favourite theory.

No longer is just ‘knowing the science’ enough. We, as scientists, writers, educators, or philosophers, must understand how to know that we know; or, if we can never properly have such meta-knowledge, we must understand problems and resolutions related to acquiring scientific knowledge.

We now live in a world where everyone is connected and able to have their say just like anybody else. Being able to argue science not just from the perspective of “X scientist said Y”, but from the relative validities or invalidities of different approaches to science either from history or from philosophy, has never been more important.

This is why scientists are now forced to broaden their scope; to defend not just their results or their thesis, but their subject itself, through the study of the History and Philosophy of Science.